Named entities are atomic objects of reference and reasoning in many cognitive applications and knowledge-centric services such as, for example, question answering, text summarization and analytics. Fundamental to such knowledge-centric applications is the need to identify named entities from their textual mentions. However, a real-world entity may have a variety of representations. For example, consider the University of California, Santa Cruz, which can have different string representations or name variations such as UCSC, UC Santa Cruz, UC—Santa Cruz, etc. Accordingly, determining if two representations refer to the same entity is a challenging primitive in entity resolution and entity linking algorithms that drive such knowledge-centric applications.